Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [1]
One might almost judge writers not by their prose but by the people around them. How nuts are they?
My father is a writer, and so were both his parents. As a kid, I suspected writing might be what was causing my family to implode.
But beyond the actual writing there was a broader kind of storytelling that seemed to define us. The family myth—stories of who we were—informed everything. My father came from an old Missouri family that arrived in Maryland on the Dove in 1634. My great-great-great-grandfather John Paul Darst was the carpenter and contractor on the Old Cathedral in St. Louis in 1830. We were prominent Democrats. My great-uncle Joe Darst was mayor of St. Louis in the late 1940s. My grandmother Katharine Darst had a daily column in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat called “Here and There” and a Sunday column called “The Back Seat Driver.” My grandfather James Darst, a dashing newspaperman whom family members called Dagwood or Dag, wrote pretty awful plays and very good short stories when he wasn’t working for Fox Movietone News. And my father, a reporter, had been an alderman in St. Louis in the ’60s with an eye toward being mayor before he quit politics to write.
My mother’s family, on the other hand, was rich in a thing called money from her father’s ophthalmology practice in St. Louis. Her childhood was one of mass before Catholic school and winning horse shows around the country on weekends, until she and her sister Ruth landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated at ages fourteen and seventeen, respectively, and then zoomed off in T-Birds bought by “Daddy” to debutante balls, a women’s college in the East, and marriage. Wild-rich-girl stuff.
What these stories seemed to be saying to me, growing up, was: things aren’t going that great now, but it’s all about to change, drastically, because Dad’s gonna sell this novel, this is the one, and there’ll be no more scraping by, no more walking home from school in January in a thin jacket and no gloves pretending you’re not cold. Mom will be restored to her former fanciness and will become undepressed and able to drink normally, as happens with literary success, and Dad will have fulfilled his lifelong dream and in doing so will stop driving everyone bananas. It seemed my parents were willing to suffer, make others suffer, and even die to maintain these impossible fantasies—even after my father eventually stopped doing any actual writing at all (not that anyone ever acknowledged this) and the fantasies were all that was left. My parents slowly lost everything and fell apart. As an adult, it’s hard not to wonder how people with their kind of talent, charm, intelligence and privileged backgrounds could wind up like them.
And then I became a writer, too. An alcoholic, broke, occasionally irresistible, destructive, quasi-adult—one who believed that writing was at least partly what was causing my life to fall apart but also that it was what would redeem it in the end. Another generation of the stories, fantasies and delusions. Ultimately, I sobered up and began actually writing instead of just talking about it, ever so narrowly avoiding repeating the exact—and I mean exact—mistakes of my mother and father. I became very much like them without becoming exactly like them. This was possible, I believe, through no moral superiority of mine and certainly no more talent than my father, but through the odd fortune of being able to see the truth and, having done that, use it to move forward. I have managed to become an artist and not lose my mind or cause others to lose theirs. I work in stories but I live in reality. Or at least, that’s the tale I now tell myself.
ONE YEAR IN NEW YORK
JUNE 1976. We were moving from St. Louis to Amagansett for a year so my dad could write his novel, Caesar’s Things, about a senator who has a nervous breakdown after being involved in a love triangle with a debutante and his